"I think it is the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately."
--George Carlin

Saturday, December 02, 2006

Public Parking and Unidentifiable Substances

So I'm not denied the internet yet. That's good.

Living in an apartment has a lot of drawbacks, some of which I've mentioned before. Living in this building is mostly fine, but the parking situation sucks a bit. We don't want to pay the extra $40 per parking space in the underground ramp the building owns, so we both have our cars in the city lot adjacent to us.

Most of the time the difficulty is stupid people--what else?--who don't know how to park. Diagonal, on the line, whatever. They either can't recognize what the yellow lines are for or their entire lives are meant to frustrate me.

Friday morning I walked out to the ramp to get in my car to go to job #1. It was 7:40 AM and the temperature was around 10 degrees. I was parked well within the ramp, so I wasn't worried about precipitation--I shouldn't have been so confident.

The driver's side windows, both front and back, had been smeared with a translucent white semiliquid, which had dripped down the side of the car and frozen (as any sensible semiliquid would have). I don't know what this stuff is. It looks like Baby Huey spilled formula on his diaper and decided to dry his ass on my car.

Or like someone took that one-gallon-of-milk-in-an-hour challenge and lost--on the side of my car. I don't need gas, so I won't be washing the window in the next couple of days, so it seems I'll be looking left through doughnut glaze.

5 comments:

I have come to the conclusion, that in the near future, parking spaces will actually have to be re-engineered to accomidate two related but equally frustrating phenomena:

1. Many gigantic-assed vehicles are no longer capable of fitting within the confines of the yellow lines with anyway to open doors without hammering the car next to them. Witness the Dodge Quad Cab 4x4: Width = 96" (this is a standard 2x4 sideways), Length=249.7" ( over 20' long), Height = 79" (lets just say that I might be able to look over the top of it if Jason was giving me a piggy back ride, however unlikely that is, though slightly more likely than me giving Jason a piggy back ride).

2. As if #1 is not enough. More often than not, the navigator of said vehicle is often unable to get the barge centered between the two lines.

Where I work, two of these massive vehicles (one Ram 2500, one RAM 3500) park side by side everyday, tag teaming 3 parking spots in the process. Now mind you, parking spots are not really at a premium, but what level of delusion leads one to this suspension of reality: "Because I drive this particular vehicle, I am entitled to at least 1 1/2 parking spots". Hell, why not park it diagonally and get 2 for the price of one.

Just last week my father and his girlfriend engaged in a several day-long discussion on whether or not Baby Huey was a duck baby or a human baby. She thought he was a human baby. My dad said he wsa a duck baby. Then he filled her e-mail box with images of the duck baby.

I have no idea who Baby Huey is, but I thought it was funny that this is the second time in a month I've had to think about his duck ass.

Almost as good as a buddy of mine heading out for work one morning and finding a cooled pile of human feces greeting him from the hood of his car. Mind you, he lives in suburbia Rosemount about 50 yards from a church.